Mozilla’s Anti-SOPA Mes...

By blacking out the default Firefox start page and using social media, Mozilla reached 40 million people with its anti-SOPA/PIPA message. According to a stats wrap-up just posted to the Mozilla blog , 30 million people in the US saw the start page’s call to action, 1.8 million visited its mozilla.org/SOPA info page, and the effort generated 360,000 emails to Congress. Additionally, Mozilla sent out messages to 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter, and its Firefox + You newsletter, over 20,000 retweeted or Liked these messages, and Mozilla drove 600,000 visits to the EFF’s Strike Against Censorship Page . For comparison, here’s how  Ars Technica  and others tabulated the contributions of some big web properties: Wikimedia Foundation – 162 million people reached, 8 million views of its Congress member contact page Google – 13 million page views to its anti-SOPA page and 7 million signatures to its petitions. Twitter – Rather than blacking out, it helped transmit 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets in 16 hours. The White House – Drove 103,785 SOPA and PIPA petition signatures Mozilla’s action didn’t have the scale of Wikipedia or Google’s effort, but it should still be commended for doing its part. Next week when the Senate votes, we’ll see if yesterday’s web-wide protest made a difference. For more info on the protests and their impact, check out TechCrunch’s stream of online piracy legislation coverage [Image Credit: SayNotes ]

Google Demotes Chrome B...

This post comes from our Search News Channel sponsor WebiMax. It appears Google does, in fact, hold themselves accountable (to some degree) for their own policies and guidelines. News broke late on Monday by Aaron Wall (an internet marketer who founded SeoBook.com), when his community discovered a “This post is sponsored by Google” sponsored post. Search marketers know very well that Google has a strict stance against paid links and states in their guidelines that “some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links”, noting that “buying and selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” Google’s official statement was: “Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products., because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.” As soon as this news broke, everyone in the SEO community wondered what would be Google’s response. Will they hold themselves to their own rules? It appears they somewhat do as Google applied a penalty against the page and searching for the keyword “browser” no longer returns Google Chrome. Google’s distinguished engineer, Matt Cutts formerly posted: “We did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines” Google announced that they are reducing the PageRank for domain www.google.com/chrome for up to and including 60 days. Interestingly enough, searching for “browser” no longer returns Google Chrome in the organic listings, although it will show up in the paid search box. Searching “chrome” however will still return Chrome in the organic listings, PageRank 1. Top billing is now going to the Download and Install page with Google Chrome coming up as a sitelink. In addition, Google’s listing for the query “browser” has been pushed all the way back to page 5. Although the domain was penalized, Google may not be doing enough to account for their actions. Since they are under recent criticism by a US Senate Subcommittee for allegations of the search titan abusing their power in the industry to favor some search engine results, Google has done the minimum to respond. Further dialogue is anticipated as to how this type of thin content and linking practice could have made it’s way through quality control in purchasing their video ads. This type of organic drop is not welcome news on the heels of recent news that Google and Firefox renew their search deal and its goal of increasing browser market share. The views and opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. Todd Bailey is Vice President of Digital Strategy at WebiMax, a leading SEO company with 500+ clients and 150+ employees as well as Lead Contributor at SEOservices.com

Spool Raises $1 Million...

When Spool debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, the app and browser extension was focused on caching videos, articles, and other web content to your mobile device. It was like Instapaper on steroids . Today, Spool will announce $1 million in new funding and an expanded vision — allowing people to push that cached content directly to the devices of their friends. Investors include, SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund and YouTube founder Steve Chen. The funding will go towards scaling the complex back-end caching technology that makes Spool defensible. Other investors contributing to Spool’s $1 million round are prolific media angel Vivi Nevo (NV Investments), Elad Gil (Director of Strategy, Twitter) Charles River Ventures, Deep Nishar (Senior VP, LinkedIn), Kevin Donahue (Former VP, YouTube), Joe Lonsdale (Founder of Palantir), and entrepreneurs Bill Lohse, David King, Nils Johnson, Matt Ocko, and Raymond Tonsing. The funding builds on a small angel round from Kevin Donahue last year. Spool is now investing the new money in a self-scaling system on cloud servers to handle its increasing load. Spool allows you to send any link to your mobile device through its Chrome and Firefox extensions, mobile bookmarklet, or a unique email address. The extensions even overlay Spool buttons next to links on Twitter, Facebook, Techmeme, and other sites. Spool’s system than scans the page and copies text, images, .PDFs, or even any format of video (including Flash) and caches them to your device’s memory so the content can be accessed without an internet connection. Rather than broadcasting a favorite piece of content on Facebook or Twitter, you can drop it directly into the Spool library of a friend’s device. This push model leads to a much higher signal to noise ratio than typical broadcast and pull sharing through social networks. Spool works great for insatiable content consumers, commuters with spare time but spotty connectivity, and anyone who flies. The TechCrunch Disrupt finalist’s mobile app beta is now available for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android phones and tablets. CEO and co-founder Avichal Garg tells me the company is “Trying to let people in as quickly as we can. They usually get in within 48-72 hours.” With no marketing and little press since launch, Spool is already #14 on the top free Android Marketplace app charts. Garg explains “Our retention curve is incredible, like DropBox or Evernote , once you have content in you don’t leave.” This sets Spool up for a lucrative recurring payment monetization model once the service can deliver on its promise. Spool could give away several months of access for free as you build a cached content library, then start charging a monthly fee. Garg says “Most startups have a retention problem where traffic spikes and disappears. Our challenge is how to get enough users in the door.” Customer acquisition shouldn’t be a problem though, as I’m loving the user experience. There’s also built-in virality since users can push content to friends without accounts, who can then access it once they sign up. Its push sharing model meshes well with new social micronetworks like Path 2 , so asked whether Spool considered itself an M&A target. Garg smiled and said, “We don’t want to sell. We’ve had acquisition offers and we’ve turned them down. There’s opportunity here.”

Chrome Is Edging Out Fi...

Android isn’t the only Google product that gobbled up market share in 2011.  Its Chrome browser also had an amazing year. By one measure, StatCounter , Chrome went from 15 percent market share a year ago to 27 percent share in December, 2011. Chrome ended the year two points above Firefox’s 25 percent share (which is down from 31 percent a year ago).  Even as Google recently renegotiated its deal to maintain the default search spot n Firefox for the next three years (to the tune of nearly $1 billion), it keeps taking share in the market. If you look at other data, the numbers are different, but the trend points in the same direction. According to NetMarketShare , which counts browser share differently, Chrome is still slightly smaller than Firefox. Chrome ended the year with roughly 19 percent share versus 22 percent for Firefox. But Chrome’s numbers are going up, while Firefox’s are coming down—Internet Explorer’s share is also dwindling. Interestingly, Google has not been able to replicate this success to the same degree with its mobile Android browser, which is dwarfed by mobile Safari across iOS devices (52 percent to 16 percent). And yet, on the desktop, Safari doesn’t seem to be going anywhere . The real milestone will be if Chrome can ever topple IE which currently still has anywhere from 39 percent (StatCounter) to 52 percent (NetMarketShare) market share, depending on which numbers you believe.

Why Hasn’t Safari Skyro...

The past few days, there’s been a lot of talk about web browsers. The report that Google will be paying Mozilla close to one billion dollars over the next three years to ensure that their search engine remains the default for Firefox is fascinating for a few reasons . The biggest is that Google now makes a Firefox competitor, Chrome. And it got me thinking about Safari. Remember Safari? While Chrome has skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple’s web browser lingers